"It was a hellish hot day and the air conditioner was
broken. A fly crawled across the top of my desk. I reached out with the
open palm of my hand and sent him out of the game." These lines are from
the opening page of Pulp, the posthumous "last"novel by our singular American
troubadour of the down-and-out, Charles Bukowski, and his words here encapsulate
nicely his general concern in this novel with death. With "Lady Death,"
to be more specific, and to disclose also the largely allegorical structuring
of the piece. With Bukowski's own recent death, it takes the reader some
work to get past seeing chief protagonist Nick Belane, private dick, as
a loosely veiled surrogate for the late Bukowski himself; "a loser, a dick
who couldn't solve anything." Bukowski was known for taking self-deprecation
to new heights; not for nothing is Pulp dedicated to "bad writing." Not
that he did not respect his works--he did, but he did not take them so
seriously that he imagined himself the grand artist. Delusions like that
might get in the way of a good drink.

Pulp is "pulp fiction" with a twist. As with Quentin
Tarrantino's movie Pulp Fiction, the novel Pulp is as much a modest example
of the genre's tawdry domain as a knowing reflection upon its obsessions.
In Bukowski's pages grimy, dark potboiler meets an allegory on authoring:
picture here the bastard singular issue of Mickey Spillane and Laurence
Sterne, and you get a sense of Bukowski's scheme. In the end our gutter-friendly
scribe hands us a "meta-pulp." This is Hammett and Chandler retooled by
a Quixote-era Cervantes--a bowery Borges or skid-row Pynchon. Or, shifting
medium, Pulp is a painting by Rene Magritte or Remedios Varo--on black
velvet. For example, Bukowski has the private-eye patois down pat. Belane:
"A dick without a gat is like a tom cat with a rubber. Or like a clock
without hands." But there is a manipulative, knowing narratological savvy
also in the response by the detective's antagonist. McKelvey: "Belane .
. . you talk goofy."

Pulp's plot line merits recording: a shadowy figure
called Lady Death hires Nick Belane ("Mr. Slow Death" to his bookie) to
find a guy named Celine--yes, that Celine. Ms. Death tells Belane that
Celine's been hanging around Red's bookstore . . . asking about Faulkner,
McCullers [and] Charles Manson." Bukowski's Celine is a paranoid boor and
gets the novel's best lines: on Thomas Mann, "This fellow has a problem
. . . he considers boredom an Art"; on the New Yorker, "One problem there
. . . they just don't know how to write"; and on writers (while fondling
a signed copy of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying), "In the old days . . . writers'
lives were more interesting than their writing. Now-a-days neither the
lives nor the writing is interesting." Wit notwithstanding, Celine meets
his maker soon after, again, leaving Belane free to pursue other related
cases, which include space-alien bombshells, whores, bars, and red sparrows.
As might be expected, Bukowski's "pulp" women are worshiped and shat upon
by turns. Belane's threat here to an adulteress named Cindy Bass is typical:
"You bitch[.] I'll nail your ass . . . against the wall."

As the novel muses upon death, salient and somewhat
predictable reflections on Identity appear, but they are neither winded
nor sour with age. Bukowski's lines are "Sartre" filtered through a pulp
vein: "Was Celine Celine or was he somebody else? Sometimes I felt that
I didn't even know who 1 was. All right, I'm Nicky Belane. But check this.
Somebody could yell out 'Hey, . . . Harry Martel!' and I'd most likely
answer, 'Yeah, what is it?' I mean, I could be anybody, what does it matter?"

Bukowski accomplishes other feats with this slight
novel, filled as it is with brief tips of the hat to Bukowski's lifelong
loves: masturbation, "loose" women, bar fights, and booze--lots of booze.
Authors too are duly noted. Celine, mentioned above, comes out well. In
addition, two thugs sent to rough up Belane early on are named "Dante"
and "Fante"--a salute to Italian maestro Dante Alighieri and Italian-American
writer John Fante, writers divided by centuries and region who shared Bukowski's
attentive eye for spiritual darkness.

The novel has its highs and lows. "I checked my desk
for the luger. It was there, pretty as a picture. A nude one." As you can
see, Bukowski is not always subtle. On the whole, however, his staccato
prose matches the novel's spare range, yielding a minimalist homage: "It
was dark in there. The tv was off. The bartender was an oily guy, looked
to be 80, all white, white hair, white skin, white lips. Two other guys
sat there, chalk white . . . . No drinks were showing. Everybody was motionless.
A white stillness." With few words, Bukowski charts the singular contours
of an eccentric cast. His neighbor, the mailman, is typical: "His arms
hung kind of funny. His mind too." Here readers will find less the labyrinthine
literary terrain of C. K. Chesterton and more the moist, fouled corridor
of Nathanael West's fiction.

Rhetorically speaking, I eschew ending reviews with
loaded quotations drenched with pathos, but given Bukowski's recent exit,
it seems worth forgoing any expository fastidiousness here. Nick Belane's
reverie is a fitting epitaph to Charles Bukowski the man and his fine last
novel: "All in all, I had pretty much done what I had set out to do in
life. I had made some good moves. I wasn't sleeping in the streets at night.
Of course, there were a lot of good people sleeping in the streets. They
weren't fools, they just didn't fit into the needed machinery of the moment."

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